We Live in Our Own Past
Politics / Social Issues Jun 25, 2014 - 04:16 PM GMTBy: Raul_I_Meijer
I’m going to step into uncharted territory, a for lack of a better word philosophical theme that I’ve long had on my mind but can’t quite figure out completely yet, and I would like you to tell me how much of it you recognize, or that maybe I’m a total fool for looking at things the way I do. You see, I often have this notion that we are living in our own past; not even our present, and certainly not our future.
It’s a feeling that creeps up on me a lot when I do my daily perusing of the financial press. It makes me think: wait a minute, that whole financial world is dead, because if you would subtract all the debt from all the assets, there would be nothing left, or at the very minimum not nearly enough to keep it going at anything like the size it had until recently, and which it needs to continue functioning (you can’t just chop off a third or half or more off a system and expect it to keep working).
Sure, it’s being kept ‘alive’ – though there’s a lot of virtual world in there – by adding more debt to the existing debt and by hiding much of that existing debt from prying eyes, but that doesn’t solve any of the fundamental problems, that’s all just lipstick on the zombie pig. And it can only lead to problems growing worse, certainly for the weaker segments of our societies.
And if the world of finance is broke, so must the economy at large be, and hence the entire model of society we live in. Which I think about on a regular basis when I see all these people live in their increasingly identical homes and get in their increasingly identical cars on their way to do increasingly identical jobs in increasingly identical offices or retail buildings. Sometimes I think perhaps the lack of variety itself is a sign of death, or dying. In any case, I wonder why all these people keep doing what they do. Don’t they have the same notion that I have that it’s really over, this model, maze, matrix, they live in, that perhaps they should take a step back and look at themselves?
I think they don’t. But I also still don’t think that makes me the crazy one. I see it as evidence that the manipulation and propaganda or whatever you call it, is doing its job, and the job is easy, because people don’t want to reflect on the fact that everything they’ve ever known, and that they’ve built their entire existence around, is not just crumbling but effectively already gone. People don’t like change, and certainly not the kind that threatens to make things ‘worse’. Whatever ‘worse’ may actually mean in this context, it could be an unfounded fear and it would make little difference to their attitude.
And it’s by no means just the financial world that looks like a bankrupt remnant of our past. Our energy resources, too, are dwindling. Over a somewhat longer timeframe, but what difference does that make? There’s very little doubt left that we hit peak conventional oil in the last decade, and it’s all downhill and harder and in the end less from there.
Shale is a pipedream, wind and solar can’t keep the grid running; these things, like the debt situation, look so obviously threatening to our way of life you’d think we’d be looking hard at seriously adapting that way of life. But we don’t, we just want to substitute one energy source with another, even though they’re hugely different and to a large extent incompatible.
We’re so addicted to the comfortable feeling of having all rooms in our homes heated or cooled, and to taking our own little transport units the same half hour drive to work and back every single day that we’d rather not think about why we do it than change our ways. Even as it’s glaringly obvious that our ways must and will stop at some point. We’re not going to find some new magical mystery energy source, and besides, both our own legacy of profligate energy use and the 2nd law of thermodynamics tell us it wouldn’t be all that magical anyway.
The consumption of energy is a potentially very destructive force, as physics clearly states. Which should really teach us that we need to be very careful about using it, burning it, and building our societies in ways that necessitate for us to use more of it all the time. Even if burning more of it makes us feel more comfortable in the short run.
Which leads to the third issue to give me the feeling that we live in our past: the damage we’ve done by using the planet’s energy resources to abandon over the past 150 years or so (an arbitrary number), to our living environment. There are many kinds of energy consumption related pollution that various sizes of ecosystems won’t be able to clean up in hundreds of years or more. Pesticides, insecticides, plastic oceans, nuclear waste we have no storage solutions for, the list is so absolutely endless it’s no use trying to name all individual items.
And then there’s the impact of methane, CO2 and other substances, which scores of people, for all sorts of reasons, seek to deny. While the principle is dead simple, even if the earth’s ecosystem is far more complex than we are smart enough to comprehend: increase the amount of these substances in the atmosphere – and soil, and oceans -, and temperatures will rise. Again, basic physics.
A world of violent storms and heatwaves, of crop losses and flooded nations, a world which at the same time will have far less energy available to deal with these issues, and no money/credit to speak of to buy that energy with. That looks like a pretty accurate picture of the world that we – or is that our children? – will live in.
The bright side is there’ll be far less of them, and per capita energy consumption will come down something big. The dark side is they will be fully unprepared, because we will have chosen to live in our past until our future caught up with it. For anyone wanting to emphasize how clever we are as a species, please explain what is so smart about this hitting the wall at 100 miles an hour thing. Or, alternatively, your instinctive denial of it.
For the rest of you, please tell me if you ever have the same feeling I do when you look around where you live, that you’re really looking at a society that has already died. See, I think that perhaps the longer we insist on pretending this is our future, not our past, and that everything is fine and/or easily solvable, the further and the more violently we’ll be thrown back into that past.
By Raul Ilargi Meijer
Website: http://theautomaticearth.com (provides unique analysis of economics, finance, politics and social dynamics in the context of Complexity Theory)
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